Arts Festivals Summit 2019

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EFA Festival in Focus | SoNoRo Festival

Simon Mundy, in interview with the Executive Director of the SoNoRo Festival, Romania, looks at SoNoRo's history and current success

SoNoRo is a quiet festival, not just because it
concentrates on chamber music, but because it does not have a big news agenda
or feature film back story. It did not start as an antidote to war, or as a way
of drawing world attention to a forgotten city. It has no big name composer,
conductor or megastar performer at its heart. It does not hire symphony
orchestras from other continents – or orchestras at all, for that matter. There
are no large subsidies, no massive productions or street parties.

The festival was first
held in 2006 and was the brainchild of the violinist Răzvan Popovici, from Romania but who had spent much of his life
in Bavaria, and Latvian pianist Diana Ketler. Their idea
was that Bucharest needed a festival that gave the city a concentrated period
of high quality chamber music and used it as springboard for ideas and thematic
connections. “Don't worry too much about the title, SoNoRo” he says, “it is
just a play on the word for sound, roughly the same in Italian and Romanian.”

The programming itself has all the marks of chamber
music, tightly bound to a theme each year and with a core group of nine
players. “The thematic concept,” says Razvan, “allows us to think deeper and
connect the music with poetry, philosophy and the other arts. For that to work,
though, it has to be a good theme!”

So far the dozen years of the festival have included seasons built around, among others, Un Ballo in Maschera, The Dreamers, Love Unlimited, Bridges, New Worlds, La Muse et Les Poètes, and just the word Up. For the 2017 festival they went for thoughts of Hide and Seek.

Răzvan Popovici

The overall label then allows each concert to have
its own sub theme, so the opening concert explores the eternal child,
translated via Mozart (who else with that theme?) via his late Kagelstatt
Trio, K498, Shostakovich's Five Pieces for two violins and piano,
Mendelssohn's Octet and Ferdinand the Bull, for narrator and violin by
Alan Ridout, who died much too young twenty years ago. A couple of nights later
the theme becomes the labyrinth with works by Mozart and Beethoven
grouped as wrong time, wrong place.

Razvan enjoys juxtaposing standard repertoire with the unexpected, one year interposing John Cage's music in between the movements of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. He says that the audience have come to expect the intelligent inclusion of contemporary music. It's about trust, he says, but it's also about the profile of the audience he and Diana have aimed to attract: not so much the traditional over 50s, nor the young looking for constant novelty but those in the middle.

He sees the average age as being 35. Since he and Diana were in their early thirties when they started SoNoRo it is perhaps hardly surprising that they are taking their own peer group as their ideal listeners – the Eastern Europeans who grew up as the Communist regimes were overthrown and survived the dismal nineties to emerge as the builders of the new normal EU society. It is a generation that is not especially wealthy (most of the tickets are between €5 and €20) but does not automatically look for state funding either – the majority of the festival's funding is private, either from donors or sponsors.

That audience, Razvan realised quickly, does not
just exist in Bucharest. The same thirst for sophisticated music making was
also to be found in Romania's other cities and so now, after starting in the
capital, SoNoRo moves on to Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca and Brasov. “I suppose we
are a barometer of Romanian society. Things could be better, of course, but
given what we have been through I have to be optimistic. And among the audience
there is a quality of listening which suggests that the way we perform is
needed.”

Increasingly he finds himself thinking of SoNoRo as
not just a music festival but as a “cultural platform”. It is built around a
core of nine players, a number which expands or contracts as repertoire
dictates, and with (says Razvan) about 30 to 40% of performers changing each
year so that the format does not get stale. It is similar to Diana Kettler's other
group, Ensemble Raro, which in turn is modelled on the Nash Ensemble in London,
which has been a benchmark for consistent and imaginative musicianship for the
last fifty years.

Like the Nash, SoNoRo is not interested in
including people just because they are famous names. To be fair, though, Diana
especially is no stranger to the world's great concert halls. She made her
debut as a soloist with the Latvian Symphony Orchestra at the age of eleven and
in the 30 years since has played in a list of venues that includes Carnegie
Hall, the Musikverein and La Fenice, and the festivals of Lucerne, Gstaad and
Rhinegau. She has been based in London for many of those years, where she
finished her studies at the Royal Academy of Music and is now a professor of piano.
She and Razvan also programme another event in Bavaria: the Chiemgauer
Musikfrühling Festival.

Grand venues are SoNoRo's natural habitat. The performances take place in concert halls, of course, and churches but also in palaces and the halls of buildings that lend themselves to performance: grand cafés, art museums, banks and the splendidly named Marble Hall of the National Military Circle Palace.

Diana Ketler

The cultural platform model means that Razvan is
ambitious to make SoNoRo even more mobile. He has already taken it to Arrezzo
(“it was good for the Italian establishment to see cultured, educated
Romanians”) and now he wants to use chamber music to open up some of the
beautiful old buildings around Romania that have fallen into disuse or lost
their function in the last century. “These buildings, castles and mansions, are
being refurbished now but they used to be the focus of their communities and I
would love to do something to help them fill that role again."

Photos by Serban Mestecaneanu

Further Information on SoNoRo

SoNoRo Festival began in 2006 and has developed into one of the most creative and appreciated classical chamber music festivals in Eastern Europe. SoNoRo regularly goes on tour, nationally and internationally, performing in some of the most prestigious international venues, such as Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall and Musikverein, including in its repertoire masterpieces from Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Milhaud, Liszt, Satie and many other brilliant classical composers. The festival has developed an extended educational project dedicated to gifted young musicians.